You Can Give Back to the AO/CM Community By Typing

[LeslieNoelani]

AO is offered as a gift; we don't charge any money to use it, or require anything from our users, but sometimes people want to know -- "Is there something I can do to give back to the AO community?"

You can type vintage Parents' Review articles!

These are magazine articles that Charlotte Mason edited and sent out to parents who were using her methods back in the late 1800's and early 1900's. Many articles have been uploaded as page images at archive.org, thanks to Redeemer College, who has given us permission to post these articles in printable, searchable text for the benefit of the CM community at large.

Basically, you claim an article that Cathleen has posted at the top of this page. Unfortunately, you do need to be a member of the forum to access the page.

Pick whatever article sounds interesting to you. Cathleen has linked to page images of the article. Respond in that article's thread to let Cathleen know you're "claiming" that article so nobody is re-typing what's already typed.

Type your article into a plain text file (like Notepad). When you're done, paste the typed text right into the thread as a response, and I'll format it into html and post it to the AO website. I do go back and proofread all the articles . . . eventually.

If you'd like more specific guidelines, there are Formatting Instructions, but if you'd rather not get too detailed, typing is enough. I'm too slow a typist to make any progress by typing myself, but I can work with typed text pretty quickly and add any formatting or make adjustments.

We are currently working on Volume 15 (1904) and we hope to fill in all the volumes up to Volume 17.

You can view or read all of the Parents' Review articles that have been typed over the years by AO volunteers at our Table of Contents listing on the AO website.

[LeslieNoelani]

Bumping this -- the typing project has slowed and we still have lots more articles I'd like to make more accessible.

The page images are posted at archive.org, so it might seem redundant to type them. But having them typed means helpful quotes from them can be copied and pasted, entire articles can more easily be printed out for study groups to read together, and, most importantly, it makes it easier to access and use them. They can be listed by subject, and you can do word searches to find relevant content.

You can see how finding articles works by viewing AO's PR Contents list here. It's not complete, but our goal is make all the articles that are currently available as page images also easy to identify and access for the general public.